Excerpt: 'Against Fairness' by Stephen T. Asma

Johnny Cash wrote that famous song about his first wife in 1956, when he was touring on the road and struggling to stay faithful.

The song "I Walk the Line" is about the sacrifices and the devotions of love — the profound lengths to which we will go for our favorites. The bonds of favoritism create moral gravity and contour the way we treat people inside and outside the gravitational field. I don't walk the line for just anybody. Johnny Cash refers to the "tie that binds" and celebrates his own willingness to be constrained by the heart. This is not the realm of fairness, equality, or impartiality. But it is a moral realm of value and action, all the same.

The fact that Cash couldn't make this noble fidelity last is slightly amusing, but tolerable, I suppose, when viewed from a mature perspective on romance. He famously took a new favorite, June Carter, and the rest is history, as they say. But it also reveals the obvious human flexibility of the "tie that binds." Some of our privileged favorites are automatically given (e.g., mothers, fathers, children, siblings, ethnic tribes), and some of them are freely chosen (e.g., spouses, friends, aesthetic and political tribes).

The relationship between freedom and favoritism is complicated. On the one hand, freely choosing one's spouse is a license not afforded in many parts of the developing world. But more provocative is the possibility that it's not much of a free choice in the developed world either. Who you end up "falling for" seems (sometimes tragically) way out of your control.

Freely and consciously choosing my tribe of friends or favorites offers additional pleasures on top of the other attractions involved. Every rebellious teenager knows the joys of finally choosing friends that not only supplant parental choices but actually frustrate and torture parent expectations. But rebellion or even "free choice" is much too flimsy to sustain real favoritism for very long, and the lasting bonds of attachment need sturdier validation.

The Virtues of Favoritism

I do not argue against obviously good egalitarian ideals, like legal due process. And I believe that ideals of fairness will have to remain dominant in the legal domain of modern nation-states. Moreover, economic and health-care disparity should be improved, and my favoritist position should not be taken as an endorsement of laissez-faire doctrine. It is not my goal to denounce all forms of egalitarian fairness, but to dethrone it as the standard of Western ethical life. One can see, given the large social-justice issues, why many philosophers try to draw a line that separates public and private ethics — suggesting two worlds of ethical norms. The cure for corruption and obscene wealth is not legalistic fairness, but something deeper — something in the cultivation of our common humanity. Overcoming greed and increasing charity are not just possible after the ideology of fairness, but we see such virtue already confirmed in non-egalitarian cultures and eras. I'm not overly Romantic about virtue-based cultures — they have room for improvement too — but many Westerners naively continue to confuse ethics with fairness.

In today's political climate, both liberals and conservatives struggle to articulate a notion of the good that accommodates individualism, tribalism, and strangers. But the Left, especially, has fallen prey to the myth of egalitarianism. The Left writhes under the neurotic push-pull of its own human attachments to family and tribe, and its contrary dogma-driven guilt about partiality and bias. Furthermore, the Left has taken a morally righteous tone in recent years by disingenuously redefining "fairness" in purely progressive terms (e.g., redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, etc.), suggesting that alternative views of justice and value (e.g., our natural nepotism) are simply forms of bigotry. As political rhetoric, this pretended piety seems advantageous, but liberals should be careful not to premise their sense of justice on a complete denial of bias — since biology usually triumphs over ideology.

The Left erroneously assumes that the "open society" cannot be achieved if favoritism is allowed to persist. Its historical response to favoritism was to level the social world on the model of universal scientific laws (see my discussion of "the grid" in chapter 3) and forbid partiality as immoral and uncivilized. I have been suggesting that liberalism confused the excesses and abuses of centralized regime kleptocracy with the more benign and meaningful forms of kin loyalty. This is understandable since liberalism was born in large part by kicking its way out of empires and monarchies. But it's time to reclaim the lost virtues of preference. What is needed is a liberalism that can admit and acknowledge our nepotistic attachments.

My own trifling attempt to poeticize our culture has been to return our preferential emotional life to the center of ethics. One of the most obvious justifications for favoritism — hinted at but not yet explicitly discussed — is that it substantially increases human happiness.

In the last decade, positive psychology and neuroscience have pursued extensive research into human happiness. Traditional psychology focused primarily on pathology, but positive happiness has been subjected to empirical analysis of late, and the findings are relevant for my argument. The main ingredient in human happiness is not wealth, property, pleasure, or fame, but strong social bonds. Strong friendships and family bonds are unparalleled in providing people with happiness. That doesn't mean they always give pleasure, because sometimes they are highly stressful. But pleasure is not the same as happiness, and on balance people self-report that their tribes are worth the trouble.

Many Americans are duped by flashy consumer culture into the belief that happiness comes from material wealth and limitless free choices. Subsequently, we tend to go in the wrong direction, trying to satisfy our endless desires, when we should be looking elsewhere for happiness.

My son's mother, Wen, who grew up in Mainland China, always chuckles at the American obsession with choice. Americans, she thinks, are quick to let go of things and people as soon as pleasure dissipates. And my Cambodian friend Naht — who spends half the year in the States and half in a village near Siem Reap, Cambodia — confirms this assessment of American whimsy. "Americans," she says, "have too many choices to be happy." Both Wen and Naht agree that too many choices lead to increased anxiety and misery, and they claim that the more obliged lifestyle, where family duty constrains your choices, actually lets you focus better and live more deeply in your activities.

In America we spend a lot of time and energy trying to maximize the most satisfactory choice. We gather data about our choices and stress out about our imminent decisions. We regret many of our decisions because possibilities are so endless. We waste hours researching the best toaster oven on Amazon, or the ultimate juicer, or the most nutritious cat food. I stood frozen and motionless recently in front of a bartender who had handed me a drink menu of over two hundred microbrew beers. Frequently, all these choices leave people paralyzed and unable to commit. When they do commit, they obsess and fret over the missed opportunities that their actual choice forced upon them.

Most of us assume that more choice always means more happiness. But a recent study by psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that Naht and Wen are correct. According to recent figures published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Americans are more depressed than ever. And Dr. Schwartz claims that it is because Americans, despite their relative wealth and their myriad life choices, are fundamentally lonely. The most important factor in happiness is close social relations, something that most Americans lack. Being connected to others, he argues, is the missing ingredient that Americans have lost in their pursuit of individual success. Materialism, prosperity, and consumer culture help to sever the traditional "ties that bind" — we're not as economically reliant on our families as those in the developing world. And then we use these same things — materialism, prosperity, and consumption — to try to fill the emotional hole. Things like demanding family obligations, serious long-lasting friendships, religious fellowship, and community closeness all bind us, but paradoxically create happier people. Throughout most of human history, these bonds were inherited, not chosen.

Americans complain of a lack of intimacy in their lives. Dr. Schwartz points out: "We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. Partly this is because we have less time, since we are busy trying to determine what choices to make in other areas of life. But partly this is because close social relations have themselves become matters of choice." In other words, we used to live in a world (more like the tribal developing world) where the social bonds were simply a "given," but now we must actively cultivate fundamentals like family and friends. For example, in Cambodia your family always lives in very close proximity, usually multiple generations under the same roof. But in the States, the family can be spread out over the whole country, forcing people to work hard (and fail) at endeavors that used to be no-brainer natural conditions. Friendships also grow flimsy at continental distances, and Schwartz concludes that "our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices."

I conclude from all of this that favoritism leads to more happiness than fairness. Happiness has been largely misunderstood as a passive state of pleasure, when it's really more like a skill — something that needs active cultivation. Acts of loyalty and favoritism are important parts of that cultivation.